Glossary

Professional terms relevant to design:

Attributes: Properties that can be designed into a product, service, or environment to improve multisensory opportunities for people’s engagement. Related to properties, factors, features, and qualities.

Design brief: A formal document that defines the client’s expectations with a design problem and solution; the deliverables, limitations, and parameters for accomplishing the design task, along with timelines and costs.

Design problem: The question or considerations within which a product is to be used or experienced. Problems or challenges are the understood issues that help the designer create a desired goal for product use. Related to problem space, design challenge, and challenge.

Design research: The process in which designers, marketers, psychologists, anthropologists, and other researchers collect data about users’ goals, activities, and practices with products in specific contexts.

Experiential: The nature of a personal experience. Related to experiential knowledge.

Industrial (Product) Design: A profession that focuses on the conceptual design of physical products, devices, and related services that have interactive, utilitarian, and functional uses.

Iterative design development: An ongoing development process through continual variations of design concepts. Initial concepts may evolve through iterative stages with milestones for refinement before settling on a final concept.

Modes: Sensory channels through which humans perceive their world, such as hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling.

Multisensory design: The design of multiple sensory features that contribute to layers of sensory experiences at the same time or in stages. Related to multimodal and multisensorial.

Physical appearance: A product’s compositional, interactive, structural, and surface properties with which a user interacts.

Principles: Approaches to consider when designing. Related to guidelines and tools.

Product aesthetics: A term associated with the appearance of artwork, to which we traditionally assign the term aesthetics. The term product aesthetics goes beyond the concept of styling that relates only to refining a product’s visual appearance. Products can also be aesthetic or pleasant to listen to, touch, smell, or taste.

Product Experience: “Awareness of the psychological effects elicited by the interaction with a product, including the degree to which all our senses are stimulated, the meanings and values we attach to the product, and the feelings and emotions that are elicited” (Hekkert & Schifferstein, 2009, p. 2).

Sensory practices: The how, what, why, when, and where of sensorially engaging with products to achieve a desired goal. Related to product interactions.

Styling: The design skill of creating coherent and attractive compositions, which was once considered to be the main strength designers brought to the design team.

Usability: A product must be easy to understand and use, and perform its task effectively and efficiently.

User-centred design: Designing products that people can use in ways that centre on their needs, not only on the capabilities of the product. In other words, the design should fit the user; the user should not have to adjust to fit the design.

User experience: The experience a user has with a product, from first contact to post-use. User experience acknowledges that the perspective of the user must inform the perspective of the designer to develop new products and improve existing products.

Value: A quality of experience rather than a financial cost, where a user values one product or one feature more than another.

Worldview: The perspective that guides an individual’s understanding of the world.